Sir – Libraries may be classified as leisure facilities, but they serve fundamentally important purposes.

We live in a highly competitive world in a country with few natural resources other than our brains. We need to develop them to our utmost.

To preserve our prosperity we must become a high-tech country with a highly skilled work force. Measured against this need, comparisons of our educational standards against rival countries are depressing. In this unhappy situation, one sign of hope is that more than half of the borrowings from our local library are by children. Investing in their early introduction to the written word is investing in our future.

At the other end of life, my wife and I — like many in our eighties — have taken every possible step towards independent living, but we depend heavily on our library for mental stimulation. If this prop were knocked away, we would have a real problem.

The costs of the service are obvious enough. One hopes that recent changes will make a more realistic assessment of the benefits possible.

Jim Dukes, Oxford